Friday, 27 June 2014

Importance of custom logo design for your business

There are many services on the web to create a logo design for your business. However, many of them will simply use software in order to produce colors, fonts and other elements from a wide range of choices to make a logo. But such mechanical use of software and elements is generally not good if you run a serious business and wish to establish your company amid tough competition. This is where importance of custom- made logo design comes to the fore.

When we talk of custom made logo design, it means that the design is as per the specifications provided by the client or business owner. The graphic designer or logo designer will do all the necessary research about business of the company and its targeted audience. Such a research is basis of creating a customized logo design since the designer wants to send a business message to the customer.

So, what exactly a client should be providing to the logo designer? The client must write an effective design brief for the designer or discuss face to face about the requirements from logo. The business owner should not force a choice of design elements such as fonts and colors while discussing or writing a brief for the logo designer.

Instead, the emphasis should be on providing information for the knowledge of the designer. For instance, the brief can include details about your company and its functioning over the years.
 Describe your ambitions and targets of business. Give information about your competitors also so that a designer has them also in mind to make your logo impressive and visible.

Your customers matters to the logo designer a lot. A logo design targets your customers and tries to lure them into buying your services or products. A memorable logo lingers in memory of the targeted customers and they can make quick buying decision when they intend to have the products or services. So, provide customer related information such as their financial background, social status, gender and age etc.

All such information is helpful in creating a custom made logo design that is specially meant to represent your business and company. Only such a logo is capable of establishing a brand identity for your products and services.

Thursday, 19 June 2014

How to create trendy and cool typography logos and posters

If you want to create an impressive profile as a designer to impress clients or you may be working on an existing logo design or poster design project, then here are some tips that will lead you to creating amazing designs.

First, open up a new canvas size 300px high by 600px wide size of new canvas and use the color picker tool.The tool helps you in picking up a right color for your canvas background as per the requirement of your project and its style.Then select the text tool to choose a trendy looking font and set up its size appropriately. You can choose color white.

Now you can start customizing the type by selecting the eraser tool and use brush to erase the edges of the text, its size and style to give it a desired effect. To make the image look cool and trendy, you should add some cool brush strokes and have some retro style dot art brush and spiral brush sets in creative manner to enhance your design.

Add a little color finally by using a diagonal color gradient. You have now a simple and easy way of creating a funky and cool typography for logo design and poster design.

You can engage people in more activities when they visit your Facebook fan page. To do so, you can connect them with YouTube videos, Twitter feed, email sign-up forms, notes and certain accounts. Also, you can monitor all of your activities on the pages to ensure that you have a right marketing strategy in place.

Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Regular changes in logo design is key to business success

One of the things that mesmerizes the customers or viewers when they look at famous logos of global brands is that they are so powerful and influential that many of them become part of our cultures. We all know that it takes many years of marketing before a brand gets its reputation and name at the global stage. They get reputation only after going through different growth stages.

As we look at famous logos of Nike, Coca Cola, McDonalds and others, we know that we are witnessing a rich heritage. Their logo tells a story of corporate success which is the result of customers recognizing their business.

Another thing to remember about these well established logos is that their companies made changes whenever it was necessary to do so. Smaller companies and business should take this lesson from global brands that there should be change in logo design to suit the changing times and current design trends.

Take the examples of logo history of Nestle, BP, BBC, Google, Walmart and Wikipedia. These global brands have been making required improvements without any hesitation and attachment to old logos. Timely and regular changes in their logo design within a short span of a decade or so is the reason behind success of their business. Imaging a company trying to do business in the changed circumstances with old logo. That is unlikely to work for most of the companies aspiring to grab larger market share.

Monday, 12 May 2014

Menu Design Should Reflect Your Restaurant Personality

As a restaurant owner or as a graphic designer, you should not take your menu design lightly since it has the potential to make or break your restaurant business. Menu is like an introduction to your restaurant or hotel to the visitors. When they look at your menu card in the restaurant table or online, they get the impression about what is going to be served on the table in terms of taste of the food and style of serving.

When creating a menu design, it should be kept in mind that the design should look like an extension of the restaurant brand. A menu represents and creates the reputation of a restaurant. This means that a clean, trendy and sleek design is desirable to make a good impression on the food lovers.

One of the ways to create a great menu design is to incorporate certain elements of the interior design of the restaurant into the menu design. A menu card that has design elements similar to that of the restaurant design style will boost confidence of the visitors in your business as it highlights a professional approach.

Bringing your restaurant interiors design elements in the menu card design is always a winning combination. You can also experiment with colors. For instance, if your restaurant caters mainly to families, you can create a menu design with warm colors such as red, yellow and brown. For such an enviornment fonts choice also should be made carefully. You can settle for sans-serif fonts to give a feeling of family environemnt through menu design for your restaurant.

Monday, 5 May 2014

How Brochures Help in Making Purchasing Decision

Brochures appear as a simple printed sheet. But they serve a crucial purpose of introducing and marketing a company’s products and services to the customers. Hence, it is important that brochures address all the issues that are usually seen as hurdles in converting the visitors into buyers. Brochures should help the customers in making purchasing decisions.

Make sure that a brochure design compares the products and services well with the offerings from the competitors. The content should discuss pros of the company’s business and products for the customers while giving details about cons of the same type of products from the competitor company. This will help the customers in making their mind about purchasing your products. The comparison should provide a list of reasons for buying your products.

A brochure must also answer critical questions that customers usually have about the products and services. Answering the questions will help in eliminating the doubts that customers have in mind when taking a look at products for the first time. A brochure design that clears all doubts for the customers helps in selling the products.

Another tip for turning a brochure into an effective marketing tool is that its design should be capable of retaining the recipients’ attention for a longer duration.

To achieve this, brochures should be printed in pleasing colors. In addition to printing, the designers should make judicious use of negative space or white space which is crucial for brochures to create a feel of luxury about the company and its business.

Thursday, 1 May 2014

Printing Cost Also Determines Choice of Logo Colors

Colors play an important role in creating a logo design. When a designer is planning to incorporate various design elements, careful choice of colors gives a distinctive appearance to a logo. However, since logos are printed on all promotional items, cost of printing also plays a role in selection of colors.

To reduce printing costs, a logo design should preferably have minimum numbers of colors. Cost of printing a logo on promotional items and apparel only goes up if the logo has several colors. A company’s cost of screen printing also goes up because of logo design using many colors. Ideally, a logo should avoid having more than two colors. Besides printing costs, logo designers should use minimum number of colors also to ensure that logo is clearly visible to them. Shading of colors is not advisable as it will only create some confusion for the viewers. Make sure that if two or more colors are in use, they all are separated from each others for clarity.

Shades of colors also contribute to enhancing of printing costs. Note that most of the non-digital printing processes are capable of printing only solid colors and not color patterns that are multi-colored. So, avoid shading a color that fades or shades into darker colors so that the logo does not face printing issues.

Generally, printers have ink colors such as black, dark green, yellow and red. But when the printers need to make specific colors that have been used in a logo, they charge extra, which escalates the cost of printing the logo for the company.

Tuesday, 29 April 2014

Typography Trends for 2014

Each year we see new website design trends changing. With these changes come the new trends in the elements that help in creating the sites. Typography is one of the most important design elements. In this year, we are going to be witness to some exciting changes about how the designers use fonts. Here are some of the trends developing in the current year.

Use of handwritten fonts on social media is steadily picking up. These types of fonts are being used for breaking the monotonous appearance of conventional fonts. With unclean lines and irregular size of the letters, the handwritten fonts create human touch to the text in logo design, brochure design etc.

Mix and match of fonts are likely to be a new trend this year. Careful combining of different fonts can create artistic look of a site. The designers mix the fonts to achieve a combined impact of different personalities of fonts for web pages.

Large fonts are likely to emerge as a new trend. This is because of emphasis on content than aesthetic of the web design. Increased screen resolutions have already made standard 12 point font irrelevant. So, web page headings may have large fonts for quick and effective communication with the viewers. You can clearly mention about your choice of fonts in design brief when you launch website designer contest on a crowdsourcing site.